Buried deep in a fjord on Norway's western bulk is Stryn, a neat, chic village with vast valley walls looming around it and a river of mineral-rich green water running through it. This is where trumpeter Arve Henriksen grew up, and it doesn't take a lot of effort to hear this landscape echo through his music: the ice-groan of a glacier in the electronics; or that unique trumpet tone, sounding somewhere between a bird of prey and the wind blowing through pine trees.

Three albums of Henriksen's startling and evocative work, released on the Rune Grammofon label over the last decade, are now being reissued on vinyl in a lavish box set, along with his new album, Chron. Diminutive and still boyishly handsome at 44, Henriksen played in music camps and marching bands in his youth, before spending two years studying music in the ancient city of Trondheim. With one ear on Bix Beiderbecke and Miles Davis, and the other on figures such as Nils Petter Molvær (part of a new wave of Scandinavian jazz that leaned towards composition and electronics), he began carving out his own language for the trumpet, imitating the breathy timbre of the Japanese shakuhachi flute.

His first LP, 2001's Sakuteiki, took its title from what is thought to the oldest garden-planning book in the world, a Japanese text published in the mid-to-late 11th century. "I look at my improvisation in the same way a gardener tries to make a nice garden," he explains. "I have tones and dynamics; the gardener has stones, trees, ponds, paths. He will work to place them in a special way, and the same with me."

Its delicate minimalism blossomed into the sumptuous Chiaroscuro in 2004, where strings, electronics and Henriksen's springwater falsetto were added into the mix. It's the most plainly beautiful of his albums, but came as he was embroiled in a divorce. "It was a time of meeting yourself in many mirrors, looking at yourself and your life," he remembers. "I was the father of three kids and trying to survive with a musical career, which was quite difficult at the time. I did some teaching, some seminars, concerts for kids ... to pay off all the stuff after the divorce. Like John Cleese! It was hell. I was really exhausted, but had this enormous energy to create. I was a maniac. I was so eager and maybe full of myself."

The experience drove him to rediscover his roots and focus on Stryn, naming his next album Strjon after its medieval name. "I asked, 'Why did I feel so depressed when I was living in that area?' And now I know the answer was that I was a teenager. There was a chemical thing going on in my brain. I can look at it now and smile a bit, but I came to know these basics of longing, solitude, depression." He would slip into his school after hours. "There were these fantastic rooms with a lot of reverb – I could stand there alone in the dark and play the trumpet. It was my way of getting through, my way of growing older."

He spent more than two years making his next record, Cartography, released on ECM and featuring a long list of collaborators, including David Sylvian, who provided gnomic spoken-word passages. Another recent collaborator was Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, who played bass on a tour last year with Henriksen's longstanding improvisatory trio Supersilent; Henriksen wrongfooted the audience with unhinged screaming and some clattering drum work. "Hundreds of drummers would have given me their car to be in my position, playing with John Paul Jones, and all of them are much better drummers. But maybe I can do things they can't, are not able to, or musically didn't think was possible, because they are stuck in this Modern Drummer magazine way of thinking. We don't have any safety net – we just jump out there and hope our aesthetics and ideas are enough to keep us floating."

His other techniques are similarly bold and irreverent: imitating reversed sounds, performing without a mouthpiece ("a fantastic, bambooish sound"), and using software to manipulate his trumpet playing. He talks of a "love-and-hate relationship" with electronics. "You can press the wrong button and it runs away. You have to bring it back again like a wild horse. But it gives you the possibility of creating fantastic things. Look at Stockhausen and [Norwegian composer] Arne Nordheim and how they made loops in the 1950s: they had to build the shit to make it happen. We can download it and a few minutes later we can loop as if we're a genius."

But, he says, there is still a "Darwinism of music" – meaning only those who can challenge the imagination will ultimately succeed amid the swathes of new technologically enfranchised musicians. The reissued kilo or so of vinyl that is his solo career is testament to his own survival instincts.